


A Shifting Destination (Iron Lady/Armor Up Multimix)

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Alcoholism, Child Abuse, Divorce, F/F, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Genderswap, Jealousy, San Francisco, girl!McCoy - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-16
Updated: 2012-04-16
Packaged: 2017-11-03 18:21:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/384435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are no maps for this. There are no guarantees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Shifting Destination (Iron Lady/Armor Up Multimix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [azephirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Five Steps on the Path to a Shifting Destination](https://archiveofourown.org/works/66247) by [azephirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/pseuds/azephirin). 



> Infinite amounts of thanks to Linnet for being my idea off-bouncer for this! (Even though in the bouncing she ultimately made this fic about five times longer... :-))

1\. _Solitary Man – Johnny Cash / Nobody's Wife – Anouk_

Jim Kirk spent his last night in Riverside sitting on his mattress with an ice pack over his face, staring at the window as the sun crept up. Or maybe it wasn't the last night; maybe it was just another night, like any other night, like the first night when he moved here after the Quint Cities, which came after Ames, which came after Hannibal, which came after...something, a whole string of worn-out apartments and part-time jobs and part-time friends in worn-out bars. 

It could've been the last night in Riverside. It could've been the first. It could've been any night in the last four years, or most of them, a couple of beers and a couple of laughs, and maybe he brought a girl home and maybe he didn't, maybe there was a punch-up and maybe there wasn't, maybe he bothered to show up for work the next morning or maybe, just maybe, he jumped on his bike and kept going. 

It was easier, sometimes, just to keep going. Easy when he always had the option to walk away. 

Eight AM saw him walking straight into enemy territory instead. He might've been empty-handed, but he wasn't unarmed, throwing easy smiles instead of fists. "Four years?" he asked Pike, head held high. "I'll do it in three."

Not like he any anything to lose.

-x-x-x-

Lee McCoy drove all night, twelve straight hours to Riverside, an open bottle on the floorboards while dawn went down to day: _catch me if you can,_ she thought every time she passed the highway patrol, but nobody stopped her and the roads were lonely enough it didn't really matter how fast she went or which lane she used. She'd edited a holo, badly, so that Joanna was surrounded by pixelated rainbows instead of the ghosts of happier days; it was taped to the dash with steri-bonds from the first-aid kit because that was all she had.

The car broke down outside of town, and Lee left it where it came to rest in the breakdown lane. She took the holo and topped up her flask before setting off through knee-high soybeans towards the shipyards on he horizon. It was already hot, and she was dehydrated from drinking, and so she tipped back the flask and pretended she didn't know it would only make things worse. She still made it to the transport on time, and locked herself in the head to sip water from the faucet and dry-heave until a crew member dragged her out.

"I may throw up on you," she warned the kid sitting next to her, while she pretended that a pull from the flask would make the flight more bearable. It didn't matter to Lee if she puked on him or not; wasn't like she still had any pride. Nothing but her bones, and a holo of of her baby, and if she was real lucky, a soft place to land, even if she had to fly two thousand miles to get there.

The kid was staring at her. The flask wasn't big, but it was big enough to share.

"Jim Kirk," he said, taking a swig.

"McCoy," she told him. "Leonora McCoy." 

2\. _Only The Good Die Young – Billy Joel / I Wish I Could Go Back to College – Avenue Q_

One month in and Jim was treading water, plunging headlong into lectures and seminars and PT and practicums before he quite knew what had hit him. Pike hadn't said anything about the curriculum, just Jim's aptitude tests, and this was the first time since high school he'd had to sit behind a desk for eight hours a day and pretend he cared.

Except in high school he'd been able to tune out and find something else to occupy his time. Now...not so much. 

He'd quickly figured out that lunch in the main mess halls was dicey; Starfleet could move starships across galaxies in a matter of hours, but there was no getting twelve thousand cadets through three lunch lines in ninety minutes. Jim didn't mind scrounging around elsewhere for something to eat, since three squares a day was still something of a foreign concept for him. It had been a while since beer wasn't a food group.

He found Leonora McCoy nursing a cup of coffee on a bench outside the main library, turning her face up to a rare patch of San Francisco sun. "Morning, Bones," he called.

"It's past noon," she drawled back at him flatly. "And will you stop using that stupid nickname?"

Jim grinned at her; the few times they'd caught up to each other he'd called her _Bones_ on purpose, mostly because _Leonora_ didn't seem to sit right on a face like hers—all big eyes and cheekbones and stubborn jaw. It also seemed too formal when they'd mainly got acquainted through alcohol and vomiting. He'd usually at least gotten to second base with women before they puked on him. 

He didn't tell her this; he settled down on the bench next to her and stole her coffee cup. "Somebody get up on the wrong side of the bunk today?" he asked, leaning in. "Or are you always this charming without caffeination?"

She rolled her eyes. "I've got every right to be grouchy. Too damn old for this routine."

"Know what you mean," Jim replied, thinking of high school again, and remotely hacking the padd of the girl in front of him so he could ask her out. Somehow he didn't think that was the kind of programming the Academy faculty meant for them to be doing during labs. 

But Bones snorted at him loudly and grabbed the coffee right back out of his hand. "Oh, bless your heart. Talk to me again in ten years, kid."

"I'm just saying, these? Are the people are I used to beat up between classes," Jim protested, waving at some of their fellow plebes on the footpaths. "Math club and stuff. And now they're making me look bad in discussion. It's humiliating."

She tipped back the cup to catch the last few drops, and then tossed it one-handed into the recycler. "I used to _be_ one of those bright young things," she said, her tone as bitter as her coffee. 

Jim saw an opening. "Yeah, but then you got better, right?" 

"Yeah," she huffed. "Like cheese and alcohol."

"Fine wine," Jim proposed.

She smirked. "And cheap vinegar."

Jim did laugh at that one. "Okay, okay, I'll stop trying to compliment you. We're disastrous wrecks of human beings who will come to no good end. Danger and disease and darkness and stuff. Better?"

"You sure do know how to sweet-talk a lady," Bones said in that bone-dry drawl, another good reason for the nickname.

 _Apparently not,_ Jim thought, but he kept that to himself. Getting shot down by a girl was one thing; Bones didn't even seem to _notice,_ which was equal parts intriguing and insulting. Instead he said out loud, "Hey, you know any place to get lunch that doesn't have a line out the door? I'm starving."

Bones shrugged. "Coffee shop has sandwiches, bagels, the saddest-looking crop of apples I've ever laid eyes on. Pick your poison."

"You want anything?" Jim asked her, standing. "I'll treat."

She looked at him for a minute, as if just noticing for the first time that he was actually _there._ "No thanks," she said. "Epidemiology proseminar in fifteen, and rumor has it it's a bad idea to eat before that one."

"Noted," Jim said, and he went off in search of coffee and sad apples, one small part of him still thinking about Bones McCoy

3\. _Dream On – Aerosmith / Haunted – Poe_

Lee hadn't meant to start a study group with Jim Kirk, but like so many things around him it just sort of happened—one minute he was complaining at her over lunch about the workload for a couple of the classes they both had, the next they were going over the readings together and she was trying to show him how to make flash cards on his padd. "Don't they teach this kind of thing in schools now?"

"Maybe," Jim said, watching her fingers fly. "Didn't really spend much time in school."

"Career truant, eh?" she muttered, giving him the stink eye. "Why am I not surprised..."

"It's not truancy if they ask you not to come," he said, straight-faced, and started telling a story about getting into a shouting match with a biology teacher that left her breathlessly laughing and late for class.

Jim had a knack for that, for getting under her armor when she wasn't looking; he barged his way into conversations like a big dumb puppy and then unleashed one of those _what-who-me_ smiles that didn't fool Lee for a minute. He was smarter than he let on, she was sure of that, but she could never tell just how _much_ smarter; he spent too much time joking around, and when he talked about something other than their coursework it was usually related to girls, alcohol, or a fight; on one memorable occasion over Thanksgiving break, all three. 

When Lee wasn't thinking about coursework she was missing Joanna, missing Tennessee, even missing Jocelyn in an abstract sort of way—Jocelyn the way she used to be, the way _they_ used to be when Lee was a resident and Joanna was a baby and they'd sit around half-delirious from lack of sleep watching cartoons on the big viewscreen in the den. There weren't too many kids around the Academy who could understand that kind of aching, the need for a feeling that had slipped away like sand; even fewer who'd put up with both Lee's melancholy and her self-enforced sobriety. She spent a lot of evenings in these days.

Plenty of time for a study group, then, in Jim's way of seeing things. He was smart enough but he didn't seem to know what to do with it—the way he talked, he'd fought and flirted his way to the tenth grade, then took his aptitudes early and dropped out. Lee suspected it was more like he'd been expelled, but either way, the kid didn't actually know how to study when he couldn't flash and dazzle his way into a passing grade, and Lee didn't exactly mind the refresher herself. Ole Miss felt like somebody else's lifetime these days.

So they met up in the library, or one of the study rooms in his dorm or hers, and reviewed for the classes they had together while Lee tried in vain to impart some general study skills onto him and Jim managed to simultaneously show off and goof off. Usually Lee was just stubborn enough to outlast his bullshit so that they actually accomplished something—or at least, she was stubborn enough in October and November. 

Now it was December, though, and there was an ache in her chest that had nothing to do with the weather. "I'm too old for this all-nighter crap," she declared, blanking her padd and shoving it into her bag as the chronometer clicked ever-closer to midnight.

"Jesus, Bones, you're always saying that," Jim said, thought she couldn't tell where he was on the sliding scale of serious to teasing that he operated under. "You're only, what, twenty-five?"

"Twenty-eight," she shot back. "You bought me a burrito on my birthday, remember?"

"Oh, _well,"_ he exclaimed, rolling his eyes as if three years were a rounding error. "It's not the age, it's the mileage, you know?"

Lee had been married, become a mother, become a doctor, and lost her father, her career, her wife and her daughter, all since she was Jim Kirk's age, and if she made it through final exams her reward would be a holiday in an empty dormitory. "I'm heading to bed," she declared, but knew better than to make any predictions about sleep. The wet and the cold suited her mood better; she headed out.

-x-x-x-

Jim found himself wandering out of the library no long after Bones did—it was harder to concentrate when he didn't have somebody else around to talk things through with, and while it wasn't like Bones was his only potential study-buddy...he tried to picture himself sidling up to Gary Mitchell and asking for help reviewing the finer points of interstellar law. Or anything, really. _What do we have here, the great Jim Kirk deigning to ask for help from a mere mortal? Hold on, I gotta take a picture of this..._

Okay, he probably wouldn't be _that_ much of a dick about it...or maybe he would, since to be honest, Jim would do (had done) the same. The teasing didn't actually mean anything, but still. The thing was, when Bones wanted to study, they actually studied; when Jim's buddies wanted to 'study,' it usually meant more in the way of pizza and beer and competitive insults, and less in the way of hitting the books. And Jim did have an image to maintain. 

His feet took him off-campus, instead, past the flashy bars and hole-in-the-wall restaurants that catered to broke and boistrous cadets with a dozen planets' worth of palates; he turned his collar up as he roamed away from the Academy district entirely, past the Presidio and in the general direction of Russian Hill. The efficiency apartments and all-night take-out joints gave way to townhouses with yards or old-fashion condos with wrap-around balconies, the kind of places Academy faculty and Starfleet Command staff might live. Beyond that, the architecture took on a schizophrenic quality, with candy-colored stucco next to heavy red brick and crisp white gingerbread opposite mirrored glass. Every earthquake and wildfire and bombing of the last five hundred years was written in the buildings up here, San Franciscans stubbornly rebuilding on the bones what they'd lost. It was a special insanity Jim couldn't quite get a grip on yet.

There was a tangle of bars and clubs in the shadow of Russian Hill, squatty functional buildings with holographic signs that clashed with the remnants of the neighborhood's wealthier past. It wasn't quite the Tenderloin—hell, the Tenderloin wasn't the Tenderloin, all bark and no bite—but it also wasn't a place where people like Gary Mitchell were going to end up drinking if they had a choice in the matter. It reminded Jim of the bars back in Iowa a little, or at least the type of bars he tended to frequent.

He wouldn't be heading back to Iowa over the winter break—there wasn't anybody or anything worth going back to, just empty houses and other people's apartments and a farm he'd never belonged to. He'd have to find his fun somewhere else.

Jim took a seat at the dark, sticky bar and surveyed his options: bars like this were mainly good for two kinds of entertainment and there weren't any likely-looking girls, which left him with one alternative. He shrugged his jacket off so everyone could see his uniform togs, could make what they would of it. When the bartender looked his way, he ordered Jack straight up. 

Three drinks later, somebody finally bellied up to the bar next to him, too close and too drunk. "Hey, Stafleet. Ain't it a school night?"

"Sure is," Jim agreed, sizing up which side the guy was likely to punch from. "Bet your mom's so proud you figured out the calendar after so long."

There were two kind of entertainment in a bar like this, and Jim would take what he could get.

4\. _Boys Wanna Fight – Garbage / This Is Your Life – Dropkick Murphys_

The campus clinic was free for students, and so even during break there was a steady stream of minor injuries, check-ups and illnesses; Lee's advisor had set her up with a couple of shifts, which gave the full-time staff a chance to enjoy their holidays and gave Lee something to do besides sit around her apartment and try not to send too many passive-aggressive messages for Jocelyn to her lawyer. 

She was at the end of one of those shifts, adding some notes to a file before they slipped her mind, when somebody knocked on the door of the exam room. Probably the admit nurse, waiting to see if Lee was ready to hand the exam room over to the next doctor on duty. "I'm almost done," she called through the door, hastily scribbling down the details of a prescription for reference before saving the whole thing in her padd.

The door popped open, but it wasn't a nurse on the other side. "Hi, Bones," Jim Kirk said, slipping inside.

Lee glanced up, prepared to ask just what the hell he was doing there. Then she got a good look at him. "What the _hell_ did you do to yourself?"

Jim's left eye was nearly swollen shut, and there was a long laceration along the right side of his jaw. Blood appeared to have gushed out of a split lip and a likely-broken nose, leaving the bottom half of his face a gorey red mess that he'd made only a token effort of wiping up. The trail of blood continued onto his t-shirt—not his uniform, this had happened in his off hours—and the sleeve of his leather jacket, along with most of his right hand. "Don't worry," he said, trying and failing to smile in a non-horrifying manner. "The other guys looked worse."

Lee steered him onto the bed and immediately grabbed a medical tricorder. "Thought you were kidding about all those fistfights you say you get into," she muttered, quickly scanning his head—no signs of a concussion, thank god, and no structural damage to the eye beyond swelling. 

"Why would I kid about that?" Jim asked. 

"Because punching people for entertainment is goddamn foolish thing to do?" Lee hazarded. She moved down to his face; looked like a couple teeth got knocked loose, but the gash wasn't deep; the broken nose was going to be a nice trick to set, though.

"Hey, it passes the time," Jim protested. Then: "Ow, _shit,"_ when Lee reached out to put pressure on his swollen nose. "That hurt!"

"It's supposed to hurt!" she snapped. The tricorder told her what she needed to see without Jim having to take his shirt off—a hell of a lot of deep bruising, including some ribs that were going to be tender for a while, but nothing severe. Even his hands were just bruised up, not broken, except for the split skin over one knuckle. "You know an injury to the eye like that can cause retinal damage? Permanent blindess? God only knows what kind of infections you're going to pick up in those dives you hang out at..."

"Okay, _mom,_ Jim said bitingly; he even physically leaned away from her as she finished the scan. "That the full text of the lecture or are you gonna tell me not to run with the wrong crowd anymore?"

Lee bit down her first response. "I'm not your mother, kid, 'cause if I was, I'd have slapped some sense into you by now."

Jim looked away from her. "Yeah, my stepdad tried that when I was eleven," he said, way too casually. "So I drove a car off a cliff. Shows you how well it worked on me."

Lee paused in front of the drug cabinet. It was so damn hard to tell when Jim was kidding, what was sincere and what was the front he put on for other people. Somehow she didn't think he was kidding about this, though. She pulled out an analgesic and a mid-range antibiotic and loaded them both into the hypo, checking the dosage twice as she talked. "Sounds like you need a therapist more than you need a surgeon."

"Tried that, too," Jim said. "She said I had oppositional-defiant disorder, but think that's 'cause I bit her." He winced again as Lee pressed the hypo into his neck, but then he started to relax as the painkillers kicked in. "Thanks, Bones."

"Wash yourself up, kid," she said crisply. "It's gonna take a little while to get your pretty face all sorted."

"Can't I just put a bag of ice on it?" Jim asked, but he was already moving towards the hand sink in the corner, so she didn't dignify that with a reply. 

She had just set up the osteoregenerator and the dermal sealant when there was another knock on the door. "Dr. McCoy? Are you done in there?" the admit nurse asked.

"Couple more minutes, Rory," Lee called back.

"Only there's another patient schedule for this room in five."

Lee looked at Jim, who suddenly needed to wash his hands really, really badly. God damn it. She cracked the door open so the nurse wouldn't see. "I'm so sorry, but it's gonna take me a while longer to get all these files updated. Been a while since I've been a general practitioner, you know."

Rory looked uncertain. "I think Dr. Barnes would let you borrow her office if you'd rather work in there..."

"Oh, I don't want to impose," Lee said, playing up her accent a little. "I'll just hide out in here and finish up my notes, and you can open up Exam Four for the patient overflow, can't you?"

"I guess so...." Rory said warily.

"Oh, bless your heart," Lee said emphatically—she even gave him a squeeze on the arm. "I'll even take care of the cleaning and the restocking for you when I'm done in here, how's that?"

"Fine...sure..."

"Thank you, darlin'." When Rory had turn away, Lee shut the door and rounded on Jim, who had the decency to look shamefaced. "Jim Kirk, you have two minutes to explain why I shouldn't just send you home with two asprin and an ice pack."

"I didn't want to make a big deal at the front desk," he said, shifting his eyes. "Plus, there were like three girls I've slept with in the waiting room already."

"Wrong," Lee declared. "Try again."

Jim sighed, and gingerly folded his arms across his chest. "Look, I didn't want to make a big deal out of it," he said. "I just got a little banged up, is all."

"You got your face messed up in a fight and you didn't want to have to explain to a discipline board that you were brawling in an off-campus bar, you mean," Lee said acidly.

"That's because it's not any of their business," Jim said. "I was off campus, I wasn't in uniform, and it's winter break. How I spend my free time is not their problem."

"Until you get curb-stomped somewhere in the Tenderloin and your body gets dumped in the bay," Lee snapped. 

Jim didn't take that bait. "Besides, I wanted you to take care of it and I knew your shift was almost over."

"I'm flattered," Lee said, and she might've been if she'd thought for a minute that this was about her skill as a doctor and not Jim's amazing ability to talk her into stupid things. No, he'd singled her out because he knew he could bend her arm into keeping this quite, because she liked him just enough that she didn't want to see him court-martialed for being another dumb kid. She pointed at the bed. "Lay down. This is gonna hurt like a son of a bitch."

It took forty-five minutes all told to patch Jim up, and she made him stick around to help her clean the room and figure out how to fudge the restocking so no one would notice the missing supplies. Then she wrote him a prescription for more painkillers and backdated it to the week before. "One thing," she said, hand hovering over the button that would transmit the order down to the pharmacy. "Before I give this to you."

"Whatever you say, Doc," Jim said casually.

Lee wanted to say _quit it with the recreational ass-kicking_ but wasn't sure that was going to come out right. And _don't put me in this position again_ would probably just send Jim to somebody else, or even stop him getting medical attention at all next time he came out worse for wear. "Just take care of yourself," she finished off lamely. 

Jim quirked his infuriating smile. "That's what you're for, Bones, isn't it?"

"Brat," she sighed, and shood him out the door so she really could finish updating those files. 

5\. The Needle and the Damage Done – Neil Young / Sober – Pink

Jim wasn't a light sleeper by nature, but he'd trained himself to the sounds of his comm and his alarm for practical purposes. Still, when he woke up in darkness he was groggy enough that he almost couldn't tell the sound of his alarm apart from the sound of the steady rain. 

The chronometer said somewhere around three in the morning. Whatever imprecations people might make about Jim's social life, it almost never involved middle-of-the-night calls on school nights. He groped for the buzzing comm and managed to flip it open on the second try. "Hello?"

_"Jim, I need you."_

It took him a minute to recognize the hoarse voice on the other end. "Bones? What the hell?"

 _"Just shut up and come get me."_

Jim swung his legs out of bet and switched the bedside lamp on, ignoring the mutterings from his roommate at the disturbance. "What are you talking about? Where are you?"

_"I don't know."_

That was when he pinged to the problem: Bones wasn't quite slurring her words, but her accent was thickened, positively coagulated around the vowels. Which made no sense because Bones didn't drink. Bones didn't drink because...

Oh. Oh, _hell._

Jim stepped out of his pajama bottoms and reached for a pair of jeans from the hamper. "Okay, uh, just give me a landmark and I'll figure you out," he said firmly, a little too loud. "Or a street, at least."

_"I'm...oh, fuck it. I don't...there's a church."_

Jim shoved on a pair of boots, pinning his comm against his ear with his shoulder. "There's a lot of churches in San Francisco, Bonesie."

_"There's a fucking church and a fucking...it's on Eighteenth. The bar, not the church...I'm still at the bar."_

That actually narrowed it down a little too well, to the point where Jim, if he were a different man, might be questioning his life choices just a little bit. But of course Bones didn't have encyclopedic knowledge of the bars of the Castro, because Bones didn't drink, except, apparently, when she did. A small part of him felt insulted that she hadn't invited him along until the ride was apparently already over.

Jim threw on a sweatshirt over his t-shirt, and grabbed his uniform-issued winter jacket, pulling the hood up snug around his ears. The rain was coming down fast and heavy, and Jim' breath misted in front of him as he slipped from his dormitory and headed towards the street. "I'm on my way, Bones. Keep talking."

_"What do you want me say?"_

"I dunno...what'd you have for lunch today?" 

She snorted wetly into her comm, which translated as a burst of feedback into Jim's ear. _"You're an idiot, kid, you know that?"_

"Hey, I'm the idiot coming to save you from the big scary church." Jim cut diagonally across the academy grounds, heading for the nearest corner where he could possibly get a cab this time of night.

Bones snorted in his ear again, and the call suddenly disconnected. 

Jim went through his own round of cursing, while he tried to call her back; when she didn't answer, he realized it was probably more practical to just call a cab. He paced in and out of the rain, wondering what the hell had driven Bones out on a night like this, to do the one thing she talked incessantly about never doing again after that first vomit-filled shuttle flight from Riverside. 

Was that why she'd called him? Because she'd already thrown up on him once before? Because he'd already seen her drunk? Had she been ditched by her friends, or had she gone out by herself? Why would she have gone out by herself? He spent the whole cab ride wound up with stupid questions like that, but when they finally arrived at the bar his brain suddenly rebooted when he realized that Bones was nowhere to be seen.

Jim climbed out of the cab and looked around. This being San Francisco, the whole street was mired in fog in addition to the rain, but still, he could see at least a block in both directions and there was no sign of life except for him and the cab driver. "Bones?" he called, hoping she was just hiding from the rain. "Hey, Bones...Bones! Jesus... _Lee!"_

A door opened up, somewhere, letting out a faint wedge of light; and there she was, limping on one side, holding what looked like a piece of cardboard over her head in lieu of a coat or umbrella. It was kind of pointless, since she was already soaking wet, but when Jim tried to take it from her she shrugged his hand off. "Are you okay?" he asked, not entirely sure of the protocol for a situation like this.

"Fucking _shoe,"_ she muttered, which lead Jim to notice that she wasn't actually limping—she was just wearing, of all things, high heels, or actually one high heel and one heel that was no longer quite so high. Well, there was one less thing to worry about. "Come on, 'm freezing."

Even if she'd been wearing a level pair of shoes, though, Jim didn't think she would've been able to get back to the cab under her own power; as it was, it would've been easier if she'd been a dead weight, because he could probably carry dead weight—instead she was squirming and staggering and trying to pull away from his arm, skidding and stumbling and cursing a vicious blue streak. Jim hadn't even realized that she _knew_ those words. "You want to cool it a little, Bones?" he asked as she levered herself into the back of the taxi."

 _"No,"_ she said firmly. "I wanna go home and I wanna get dry and I wanna drink water until I float off to bed for a week."

"That's a good plan," Jim said, rather than point out all the times she had scolded him for attempting to do exactly that. "Let's go with that plan. Your roommate is going to flip her shit, though."

Bones just muttered something unintelligible and slumped down in her seat. She was on the tall side, with a kind of rawboned lankiness that Jim had always appreciated on an aesthetic level; now she seemed like all knees and elbows jutting out in every direction, head hanging low, icy rain water dripping off the tips of her bangs. Jim kicked the poor sad piece of cardboard out of the way and wondered if he ought to offer her his coat or something—if there was even a point, if they'd both just end up getting soaked as soon as they stepped back out of the cab.

It took him a moment to realize that Lee's shoulders weren't shaking just because she was shivering. That the soft sounds she was making weren't curses anymore. "Oh shit," Jim blurted, when he realized she was actually _crying._

"Shuddup," Lee said thickly, and folded down further into herself like a pissed-off hedgehog.

Jim shut up, for lack of anything more intelligent to say; the cab driver surely noticed, too, but aside from asking Jim if there was anywhere to drop them closer to Lee's dormitory, he didn't comment. Lee let Jim take her arm to steady her while she clambered out of the backseat, but once on her feet she charged off in a crazy, stumbling zig-zag that left Jim scrambling to keep up. 

The desk attendant in the dorm gave them both a knowing look; Jim fought the urge to try to explain, mostly because he was afraid he'd lose Lee and get stuck in the building without the passcodes. By some blinding stroke of luck, Lee's roommate wasn't around, so there was nobody to worry about waking as they clambered into the room and Lee fell into a squishy heap on the end of her bed. 

"So," Jim said, handing her a towel, which she took but didn't use. "Um. You good?"

She didn't answer; she might've still been crying a little.

"Bones?" Jim prompted. When she still didn't answer, he sat, gingerly, on the bed near-ish to her. He wondered if he ought to put an arm around her. "Lee, you gonna say something to me?"

"It's her birthday," she blurted. 

Jim blinked. "Whose birthday?"

"My daughter's."

 _Oh, shit._ That explained...a lot, at least. "I, uh, didn't know you had kids," he stammered, feeling like a grade-A idiot.

"Not anymore I don't," Lee growled, twisting the towel in her fists.

Yeah, that was making all kinds of additional sense now. Jim rubbed his hands on his wet jeans as he contemplated a couple of different things he might say and concluded that all of them were stupid. "I'm sorry," he tried, since he had to say something.

Lee just nodded miserably. "Me, too."

-x-x-x-

Lee woke up in stages, most of them unpleasant. She didn't remember the last time she'd been this badly hungover; lost some of her tolerance during the past six months or so, she supposed, and not so much fallen off the wagon as taken a running leap. She hoped the rest of her neurobiology research group didn't think any less of her after...whatever she did after the third round of drinks. God, she hadn't blacked out like that in ages. 

She managed to roll over, and when she felt able to brace herself for dealing with daylight, she raised her head. The chronometer on her nightstand was exactly what she'd feared; the glass of water and the hypospray, not so much. 

Jim Kirk passed out on her roommate's bed, definitely not.

The noise she made wasn't so much a word as a creaky sort of _eh?_ but it was enough to get Jim to pop awake with a snuffling noise that would've been endearing to anyone without a hangover. He gave her a sleepy smile and rolled over onto his side. "Hi," he declared. "You snore."

Lee pulled the duvet over her face for a couple minutes, but no, Jim was still there. "What," she said, which was an improvement over non-verbal vocalizations at least. 

"Analgesic," Jim said, leaning over to point at the hypo. "Water. And if you're not too pukey I'll take you out for a burger at the best hangover-food spot in Academy Heights."

"No burger," Lee blurted. She'd always been more of a biscuits-and-gravy girl, anyway, but right now she wasn't sure she'd be able to keep down the water.

Jim nodded. "Suit yourself. I might go anyway, seeing as I now owe your roommate dinner for a week."

A funny feeling took root in Lee's chest, a jumble of uncertainty and shame and hangover. "You're s'posed to be in class now," she reminded Jim, reaching for the hypospray.

"So are you," was all he said, before he swung his legs back up onto the bed and stretched out again. 

The analgesic didn't do much more than take the edge of the headache, but Lee figured it was enough. "Thank you," she said quietly, burrowing down into the bed again. "Now let's never talk about this again."

"Don't mention it," Jim said, but Lee wasn't sure what, exactly, that was an answer to.

6\. _Home Sweet Home – Motley Crue / Little Room – Norah Jones /_

It started as a random suggestion, one of Jim's little tangents in the middle of a group study session. "We should get an apartment together next year."

Lee gave him the stink eye over the edge of her pad. He gave her the Mr. Sunshine smile. "You in the market for a housekeeper or something?"

"I'm in the market for a roommate I don't keep fighting with about who's taking up more closet space," Jim said. "And we get along great and I'm housebroken. Whaddaya think?"

Lee told him what she thought, and he'd laughed at her, and they'd gone back to work.

Right around the time of finals, however, the Academy had released the numbers in the housing lottery for the coming academic year, and Jim had taken one look at Lee's and declared, "Okay, that's it, you're my roommate now."

"What number did you get?" Lee asked irately, snatching her padd back from him.

"Six thousand something," Jim said. "It's hopeless. I'm going to have to live in a broom closet and sleep in a drawer."

Lee cuffed him upside the head for that, but he didn't let up, and honestly, she wasn't getting into any of the on-campus apartments without a roommate anyway...

"Ground rules," she said, in the end. "We split the cleaning, fifty-fifty."

"Gotcha," Jim said, making notes of this like it was minutes of a meeting. "No alcohol in the apartment."

Lee was gobsmacked for a minute, because the last and only time she'd slipped up had been _February,_ damn it, and-- "All right," she snapped. "No fighting in the apartment. Not even that homoerotic play-wrestling you and Mitchell are always up to."

"No cilantro, period," Jim declared, not taking the bait. 

Lee folded her arms across her chest. "And I'm not going to be your personal physician," she declared. "No coming home with split knuckles and lacerations and expecting me to do your sutures in the middle of the night. You want to be a punching bag on your own time, you go to the emergency clinic like a responsible sentient being."

That got him to flinch a little, but he nodded along and didn't hesitate to add it to the list. "You're not allowed to push me around by claiming you're older and wiser."

"Even if I am older and wiser?" Lee asked.

"See? That right there?" He wagged a finger at her. "No more of that."

"All right, keep your pants on..." Lee paused. "Actually, make that a rule—public rooms are pants-mandatory."

"You drive a hard bargain, Dr. McCoy," Jim said with a theatrical sigh. 

By the actual day of the lottery, they had a huge long list of rules, mostly facetious ones; Lee made a hard copy and highlighted the ones that mattered. Including the one about alcohol. Maybe it hadn't been an accusation on Jim's part, she realized by that point; maybe, in his own stupid way, it had been an offer, instead. 

Lottery number #450 netted them a two-bedroom apartment in an on-campus building with five floors and no elevators. "I'm not dragging my ass up and down five flights of stairs every day," Lee protested.

"It'll be fine," Jim assured her, and reached over her shoulder to prod her padd, claiming the last remaining unit.

-x-x-x-

Jim would've thought that a full year of mandatory PT would have prepared him for this. He decidedly did not remember the last time he was this dramatically wrong. At least not in a way that didn't involve alcohol.

At least the apartment was furnished, albeit with crappy metal-frame furniture from the twenties, because Jim couldn't fathom dragging anything that heavy up all those narrow stairs. Not while what seemed like the entire rest of the building was doing the same thing on the hottest day San Francisco had seen in ten years. And his reward for finally getting all his crap up the stairs was to then _unpack_ said crap, when what he really wanted to do was pass out on his ugly metal-frame bed for a couple of hours and then eat an entire cow. Or maybe the other way around; he wasn't committed.

Instead he stared at his cargo transports for a while, and then went into the living room and stared at his other transports, and the ones Bones had labeled in jagged doctor-script. He was not entirely sure he had ever owned this much stuff in his life; he owned _dishes_ now, _forks,_ Bones had made him buy forks because she was taking responsibility for shower curtains and bath mats. Jim had joint custody of a bath mat now. How was this his life?

He opened and closed some of the transports at random, vaguely aware that they had a kitchen now and he could cook things—he'd watched Bones haul up a couple bags of groceries, just basic stuff like bread and milk and peanut butter, but it was kind of pointless without dishes and forks and things to eat it with. (And almost before he considered skipping the utensils he could supply Bones' answering rant in his head: _Did you just stick your finger in that? Were you_ raised _in a barn? Or are you just not aware of how many infectious agents you could be carrying? Especially when I think of all the places that finger's been...)_

(It had raised some eyebrows, when he and Bones had signed up in the housing lottery together, and they'd had to sign a thing—but, as Jim had pointed out to more than one person, it wasn't like cadets of various sex/gender/orientation configurations didn't room together in other contexts. Gary Mitchell's first roommate had reproduced with pseudopods, for fuck's sake, two humans had a lot fewer issues to work out between them. _Besides,_ he reassured Lieutenant Finny when the guy wouldn't let it go, _I'm pretty sure McCoy's only into women. My virtue is safe in her hands._

(Not that he had much virtue, or that he was completely sure—he knew about her ex, but so far he hadn't known Bones to be into anyone else except possibly Connell Barrymore from _The Connell Barrymore Show_. Which didn't quite count, because frankly, so was Jim.)

He made the executive decision to just order out; cooking for themselves like responsible grown-ups could wait until tomorrow. This entirely reasonable course of action was derailed the moment he pushed open the door to Bones' room and realized that not only had she hauled all her stuff up, she'd actually done a halfway decent job of unpacking; there were holos scattered all around the room, two padds set up on the desk, and Bones was sprawled out loosely on her (neatly-made, metal-frame, entirely-to-narrow-for-what-he-was-suddenly-thinking) bed.

Jim abruptly revised his plans, and threw himself down on the bed next to her. Bones squawked and smacked him upside the head. Jim stole her pillow, and they had a brief, playful wrestling match that ended with them both sprawled out in a loose pile of limbs halfway on top of each other, too tired to go on. 

"You have your own bed," Bones told him, breathless and a little drowsy.

"Can't find my sheets," Jim admitted. 

"Maybe you should've labeled your transports, then."

"Maybe you should help me look for them."

She huffed at him. "It's your own damn fault they're lost."

"I also lost the dishes."

She groaned, and buried her face in the pillows. "Pizza or Thai. None of that nasty Orion barbecue."

"But I like Orion barbecue."

"It's sour enough to strip the paint off a board."

"So?" That got him another swat with a pillow. "Aw, you never let me have any fun."

It occurred to Jim that they were laying basically on top of each other, and that Bones was wearing a sleeveless top, and in the cool silence inside the apartment there was nothing stopping them from...well, whatever they wanted, really.

"You smell like you rolled in something," Bones observed, almost yawning halfway through.

"Do not."

"Do too."

"So do you, then."

"Hrmph."

The windows in both bedrooms faced east, so the sunlight had already dimmed to a hazy glow. The beds were pretty comfortable, all told. _I should get up and order food,_ Jim thought, because he was starving and because Bones had told him to. _I should probably not be snuggling with my probably-gay roommate._

Instead he let his eyes drift shut, and the next thing he knew the windows had gone completely dark and Bones was sitting upright, rubbing her eyes, looking a little bewildered. "What time's it?" Jim asked, stretching.

"Dunno," she admitted. "Didn't unpack my chronometer yet."

Jim thought for a minute. "Does that mean I can go back to sleep?"

_"No."_

"Damn."

7\. _Tired of Sex – Weezer / You Belong With Me – Taylor Swift_

There were panties on the coffee table.

The panties themselves weren't a shocker; they were pretty conservative, just a bit of lace around the edges, the kind of thing most humanoids could wear. The fact that they were unfamiliar panties—well, the walls of the apartment were not what you'd call thick, and she knew what Jim had been up to the night before. And well into the morning, by the sound of things, which was new.

It was the fact that the panties were _on the coffee table._ And the matching bra was _under_ it. That, really, was what broke the metaphorical camel's back.

Lee found a plastic bag for leftovers in the kitchen, packed up the underwear, and labeled it in thick black marker _BIOHAZARD LEVEL 3 SAMPLE 000-X ORIGIN UNKNOWN._ Then she taped it to Jim's bedroom door. The rattling of the hardware provoked soft sounds of life from inside the room, but Lee didn't wait around for Jim to get decent (or, God help them both, for Jim to come out without bothering to get decent first.) She gathered her bag and stormed out of the apartment, in search of coffee, and a place to work that was devoid of hormonal children and their potentially disease-ridden leavings. And when Jim tried to call her later in the day, that was exactly what she'd tell him, too. 

-x-x-x-

Jim spent three hours not exactly _panicking_ over Bones, but he was sure as hell worried about where she'd gone off to. Now that they'd both cleared most of the core requirements they didn't really have classes together anymore, but Bones was one of those people with a schedule you could calibrate your chronometer by, and the fact that she apparently hadn't come home after her clinic hours had Jim increasingly on edge.

 _She's a grown woman who can take care of herself,_ he reminded himself about ten times—usually in the mental voice that sounded an awful lot like Bones herself. But then again, the last time she'd been out later than planned he'd had to go rescue her from the Castro in the middle of the night. 

He got to the point where he was actually contacting other people to see if they'd seen her, which was the first he heard about Bones McCoy actually having a date. 

She came home around ten, which was at the same time charmingly early and the point at which Jim would've been calling the police if he hadn't gone snooping. She was wearing a _skirt._ "Didn't expect you to be home," Bones said, slipping out of her heels and padding around the kitchen barefoot.

"That's funny," Jim said. "'Cause I was about to say the opposite."

There was a pause in the sounds from inside the kitchen. Bones poked her head out. "Come again?"

"Heard you had a hot date tonight," Jim said. "Was the last to hear, in fact. Was she blonde?"

 _"He_ is a cardiothoracic specialist from Cartagena," Bones said, and her voice went cold so fast that Jim was kind of surprised ice didn't form on the windows. "Not that it's any of your business."

Jim tried not to show his surprise at the pronoun. "I dunno, I think it gets to be my business when you don't answer your comm the first _four_ times I try calling you."

"Yes, because I'm going to step out on my date to sooth your wounded ego whenever you feel like it," she snapped back.

 _I didn't know where you were!_ sounded childish; Jim wasn't about to open up that flank. "Yeah, because it's my _ego_ that's worried you're getting shitfaced in another dive in the city."

Her eyes narrowed; she folded her arms across her chest in a familiar battle post. "I'm sorry, did I miss a temporal anomaly this morning? Are you my father now?"

"I'm just looking out for you," Jim blustered.

"Funny," Bones spat. "I tried that line when I warned you about all the intergalactic crotch rot you're bringing home and you blew me off."

"I thought you weren't my personal doctor," Jim snapped. "House rule number four and all? Or does that not apply to bitching about my sex life?"

At some point Jim had stood up; he wasn't sure when, but suddenly they were dangerously close to one another, almost shouting in their faces. "Look, kid, just because _my_ personal life isn't a non-stop personal porno doesn't mean I don't have one," Lee barked at him, "Who and what I date are none of your goddamn business until the point I start bringin' 'em home and leaving their britches on the lampshades."

"That was one time--" But Bones had already stormed into her room, slamming the door behind her, leaving her fancy shoes by the door. "Fine!" Jim snapped, knowing his voice would carry. "I don't even care what you do, you know? You do whoever you fucking want!"

Then he went into his own room, slipped his headphones on, and turned the lights out. If there was anything but silence from the room next door, he couldn't hear it.

-x-x-x-

The cardiothoracic guy from Cartagena called Lee back the next day to gush about what a great time he'd had. Lee politely apologized and said she wasn't sure when she'd have free time to see him again. Then she went down to the gym and ran around the track until every muscle in her body was threatening to seize up. First damn date since the divorce was finalized and here she was giving the guy the gentle let down--

And no, it wasn't because of Jim. Or it wasn't only because of Jim. Or it was because Jim was just a manifestation of a bigger problem, like the alcohol, like all the holos with the faces edited out. Jocelyn had henpecked her and Jim tried to push her around like a protective older brother and none of it was Lee, by herself just Lee, she wasn't moving forward so much as trying to catch up. 

That made sense in her head, anyway. Best she was likely to get without a couple of drinks to lubricate the process. 

But she'd got shut of Jocelyn, even if she'd lost Joanna in the process, and she was working on the drinking. (God, she wanted a drink right now, wanted it more than could possibly be safe). She was working on a day when she could restore those holos and look at where she'd been without flinching. And Jim...

Well. That was another problem altogether. Because Jim was cute and Jim was her friend and Jim was twenty-one going on twelve, and getting involved with Jim when she was still in so many other pieces couldn't possibly end well. Could it?

Did she dare to find out?

-x-x-x-

"So how long you had a crush on your roommate?" Gary asked, and Jim nearly spit up his beer. "Oh, don't go all blushing-virgin on me, Kirk. You've been bitching about her for the last twenty minutes."

"Bitching does not imply crush," Jim said, after he was done coughing. "Bitching is the total opposite of a crush."

Gary made his eyes wide and threw out a grotesque pout. "She's so mean to me! She went on a date and I got all angry! We live in the same apartment but it's totally platonic because I'm too much of a boy scout to make a move!"

"Fuck you, Mitchell," Jim said, taking a more controlled sip of his beer. "And seriously, when have you ever seen anybody call be a boy scout?"

"Point," Gary admitted. "Still. If there were anybody other than McCoy I'd say you just need to nail her and get over it."

Jim felt an irrational spark of irritation; he didn't think he'd ever heard anybody talk about Bones like that. "And what if I don't want to?" 

"Nail her?" Gary asked, winking. "Or get over it?"

Jim drained his glass, and realized he didn't really have an answer for that. 

8\. _Landslide – Smashing Pumpkins / Landslide – Fleetwood Mac_

Lee was too damn old to be celebrating birthdays anymore, but somehow Jim talked her into going out—an amorphous group of cadets, half medical and half other specialties, and it wasn't officially a birthday outing but somehow she ended up with a man in a glitter sombrero singing to her anyway. 

"Twenty-nine," Lee sighed as she dug into her complementary birthday flan. "Jesus, I'm old."

"You're only as old as you feel," Jim said philosophically.

"I feel old," Lee protested. Jim sighed and stole a bite of flan.

It wasn't a bad outing, though. She got to see some acquaintances she'd kind of lost track of, got to see other people for the first time outside of labs and lectures, got to relax in something other than her uniform and drink an enormous (virgin) margarita while watching Jim and one of his buddies trick each other into eating increasingly bigger jalapenos. Normally she wouldn't have much patience for that kind of kid stuff, but just then she was so relaxed it was funny. Endearing, even.

Last birthday had been spent reviewing the finer points of Federation history with Jim in a hole-in-the-wall burrito stand. The birthday before that she'd been fired from Baptist Memorial for absenteeism. She was sensing an uphill trend.

Jim insisted on walking home with some little blonde lab tech, _to make sure she gets home okay,_ and Lee took that to mean he wouldn't be making it home before dawn. She went home, changed in the t-shirt and soft sleep pants she wore as pajamas, and turned on the TV; she was a little surprised when, about half an hour after she got back, Jim let himself in and flopped down on the couch next to her. "What happened to your blonde?" Lee asked him.

"She got home okay," Jim said with a shrug. 

"Very chivalrous of you," Lee said. 

"Yeah, I'm a regular knight in shining armor."

She got a glass of water from the kitchen and brought him one, too—though he hadn't been drinking, she'd noted, not even when that Mitchell kid tried to press a tequila shot on him. Jim took the glass, and they watched a little bit of _The Late Show,_ snickering in all the right places. Just sitting next to each other, a little sleepy and a lot relaxed, and it occurred to Lee that she hadn't been this comfortable in a long time, this... _content._ Not exactly at peace, but getting there.

Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe that was an answer, sort of.

"Hey, Lee?"

She looked up; Jim so rarely deigned to use her real name, it almost always signaled something important. "What?"

He wasn't looking at her, but at the fabulously witty writer who was bantering with some other fabulously witty writer. But his voice was serious when he said, "I wanted to ask you something, and if you say no, that's fine, we'll just forget I said anything. Okay?"

"Jim, what the hell are you--"

And then he was leaning over the couch, closing in on her, not just physically but with intent, and there was no mistaking what he was preparing to do. But he hesitated, giving her plenty of room to back away. "Just once," he said. "But not if you don't want to."

Lee swallowed, thinking of the eight hundred ways this was a terrible idea, fraught with peril, her and this kid seven years her junior, too old for his skin, and between them they had more issues than National Geographic but he was warm and solid and she was kind of sick of second-guessing all her decisions, you know? "Is this just 'cause you didn't get me card?" she asked, straight-faced, and when his eyes went wide and surprised she closed the gap and kissed his slack mouth.

Jim was warm and peppery—all those damn jalapenos—and once he'd caught up to her he dove in, wrapping her up and steadying her so he could taste every inch of her mouth. Lee did her best to return the favor, and maybe she was finally seeing what all those girls he brought home on weekends were seeing, in the soft strength of him and the rasp of his nearly-invisible stubble. 

They could've stayed like that for hours, kissing gently, Jim still in his button-down and jeans, Lee in her PJs—she muted the show at some point so it was just the two of them and the soft sounds of their breathing and shifting clothes. He got a hand up her shirt and she got a hand on his ass, and at some point she realized where this was going, that this wasn't just a kiss and she was sure as hell fine with that.

She broke free just long enough to say, "My room."

"Your room what?" Jim muttered against her throat.

"My room has clean sheets," she said, pressing down against the thigh she found herself straddling. 

"So does mine," Jim muttered.

"You have a different definition of 'clean' than I do, Jim."

He flashed her a look and a grin; she used his name about as often as he used hers. "Your room," he agreed, and then slithered out of her grip. "Race ya."

Lee stumbled after him, one hand hooked onto his belt. Maybe she didn't feel so old after all.

9. _My Way – The Sex Pistols / Long Way Around – Dixie Chicks_

Jim woke up slowly, twined around somebody soft and friendly—and when he realized it wasn't just anybody, he couldn't quite break down a grin. Lee was running her hands up and down his back, along his shoulders—not a doctor's kind of touch, just light caress, touching for the sake of touching. He liked it, and he liked that she liked it, so he held still and tried not to give away that he was awake—knowing Bones she'd clam up again and stop if she knew.

Her fingertips drifted down the small of his back, tracing the fine hairs, the odd freckle, and then lower over the curve of his ass. Paused there. Pressed more firmly. Lee shifted a little, and he could feel her craning her neck to look; something about the gesture didn't feel right. "Never done pegging before, but I'll try anything once," he mumbled against the pillow, hoping that whatever it was, he could joke it into submission.

"I didn't know it was that bad," Lee blurted.

Jim looked up and rolled partway over, dislodging her hand. He tried parsing that sentence and failed utterly. "I don't—uh--I mean, you seemed to be into it at the time, I'm sorry if I didn't--"

"What—no, no, you idiot," Lee said, talking over him. "I mean—Jesus, Jim, that fucker left _scars."_

Jim blinked, and then it clicked. Frank and his belt, or Frank and his stick, or Frank and pretty much anything he could get a swing with; he'd somehow thought Lee already knew, but maybe she just hadn't quite understood. "I know," he said blankly, and when that didn't seem to have any impact on her distress he added, "Hey, it was a long time ago, okay?"

"And I can still see the marks," Lee spat. "Jesus, Jim."

He doesn't know how to interpret this. "It was a long time ago and I'm over it," he said, more firmly, rolling over to be close to her again. "He might've marked my hide, but that's all he did. All he's ever gonna do. I'm over it."

"Sure you are," Lee said, like she didn't believe him. "Doesn't mean I don't want to go kill the bastard, though."

"If you do, can I go strangle your ex?" Jim asked, and he meant it as a joke until Lee gave him a Look and he realized, yeah, if he ever met the other ex-Mrs. McCoy he wasn't sure he'd be able to keep his mouth shut. Maybe if their kid was in the room. Not otherwise.

"Jocelyn never hit me," Lee protested.

"From where I'm standing, the effect was basically the same," Jim said, and by the look on Lee's face he knew he'd hit a nerve. And then, because he really did want to lighten the mood, "But really, there's way more awesome ways of getting arrested than murder. I vote we try those first."

Lee looked like she wanted to argue—frankly, she pretty much always wanted to argue—but Jim could see the moment she decided against it. She tucked herself into his side, curled one hand over his hip. "Okay. What's your ideas?"

Jim grinned, settling back on the bed, amazingly content to just lay there for now. In a home with forks and bathmats, with a woman who mattered, "You ever think about doing it on the Golden Gate Bridge?"


End file.
